Old Persian and the cuneiform inscriptions

High on the cliff at Bisotun, on the old road from Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau near Kermanshah, Darius the Great had himself carved standing over a line of bound rebels. Beside the relief runs a long text in three languages and scripts: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It begins with the words adam Dārayavauš xšāyaθiya vazraka, ‘I am Darius, the great king’, and goes on to name him xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, ‘king of kings’, the phrase that survives in Persian as shāhanshāh.

Old Persian is the ancestor of Middle and New Persian, a southwestern Iranian language spoken in Pārsa, the region now called Fars. It is known almost entirely from royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid dynasty, from the late sixth to the fourth century BCE, at Bisotun, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rostam, Pasargadae, Susa and Hamadan, along with a few objects such as seals, weights and vessels. Day-to-day administration was carried out in Elamite and Aramaic; Old Persian was a language for kings to speak to eternity in.

A script of wedges

The script is cuneiform, pressed or chiselled wedges, but unlike the Mesopotamian systems it borrows from, it is nearly an alphabet: some three dozen signs for syllables and vowels, a handful of word-signs for terms such as ‘king’, ‘land’ and Ahuramazda, numerals, and a slanting wedge to divide words. Its simplicity has led many scholars to think it was devised on purpose, perhaps under Darius himself, who in a passage at Bisotun seems to speak of a new form of writing. Whether that passage means what it appears to mean is still argued.

The key to the cuneiform world

Because it had so few signs, Old Persian was the first cuneiform script to be read in modern times. Georg Friedrich Grotefend made the first convincing identifications of royal names in 1802. Henry Rawlinson, a British officer, copied the Bisotun inscription at some risk to himself on the cliff face in the 1830s and 1840s and published his translation of the Old Persian text in the later 1840s. With the Old Persian version understood, the Babylonian and Elamite versions beside it could be cracked, and through them the vast archives of Mesopotamia.

For Iranians the inscriptions are something more intimate than a philological puzzle. Words still in use, shāh, bum ‘land’ (Old Persian būmi), dast ‘hand’, can be traced back to them, and lines from Darius’s inscriptions at Naqsh-e Rostam, in which he describes the qualities of a just ruler, are often quoted. Bisotun has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2006.